Dive Brief:
-
OpenStack announced a new certification program aimed at cloud computing professionals on Monday.
- OpenStack, which has open source cloud computing software for public and private clouds, is hoping the new exam will help employers more easily identify qualified job seekers for its platform.
-
The new performance-based Certified OpenStack Administrator exam is now available through the OpenStack Foundation's training marketplace.
Dive Insight:
Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation, told CIO.com that, "cloud computing has challenged companies to re-skill engineers and redefine culture and processes."
In fact, the number of OpenStack jobs listings doubled in 2015, according to Indeed.com. And the average OpenStack cloud engineer salary is $133,000, which is 36% higher than the average cloud engineer's salary, according to OpenStack.
The open source Infrastructure as a Service platform has seen huge growth over the last couple of years, and is particularly appealing to smaller companies or those that don’t want to commit to proprietary cloud providers for long periods of time. According to an April 2016 OpenStack Foundation survey, more than 585 companies have supported OpenStack in some way.
But using OpenStack can be challenging, and the demand appears to be greater than the talent needed to support it, thus the new certification program.
"The barriers to adoption of OpenStack are complexity and lack of talent," Darrin Hanson, vice president and GM of OpenStack Private Cloud Solutions told Fortune in February. "We have a very prescribed view of how it works and we run (hundreds) of thousands of nodes across public and private clouds."
